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How Can You Optimize Your Customer Service Agents’ Productivity Through Messaging?

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How Can You Optimize Your Customer Service Agents’ Productivity Through Messaging?

Maintaining a humanized and qualitative customer experience is the question to solve during the pandemic, but brands typically had to do it with a reduced budget. How can we make ourselves more available to our customers at a lower cost? Online conversation, which has become an essential part of the customer relationship along with telecommuting, is an increasingly important answer to this question. It's also proving to be a cost-effective solution for websites, allowing customer service teams to become more efficient and productive. 

Covid-19 has transformed the customer experience in a profound and lasting way. In their quest for reassurance, consumers require empathetic and accessible customer service from brands. Companies, for their part, know that this crisis is an opportunity to reveal themselves to their customers and prospects, to satisfy them, and build loyalty by maintaining quality customer relationships, despite strict budgetary constraints. "In a downturn, cutting costs is inevitable. But that does not have to come at the expense of a good customer experience, which can create substantial value."* says McKinsey. How are businesses supposed to deliver this higher quality of service with one arm tied behind their proverbial backs? 

At the height of the pandemic, millions of people were able to achieve digital transformation, working and consuming primarily online. Communicating with brands on the same channel, digital, has become the new normal. In many of the countries hit hardest by the virus, total messaging has increased more than 50% over the last month.** For companies, offering customers the possibility to Chat reconciles the best of both worlds, maintaining a good customer experience and controlling costs. In the digital world, messaging is a cost-effective means of communication, thanks to the increased productivity it allows. Let's take a look at why.

1. An Efficient and Frictionless Communication Channel

  • A means of communication more efficient than e-mail
    According to a study made by Hubspot, almost ⅔ of buyers expect a response within 10 minutes to any marketing, sales, or customer service inquiry.*** Exchanges made through e-mail significantly prolongs the average resolution time, especially when the agent needs more information. Communicating through Chat allows an efficient face-to-face connection between the visitor and the online advisor. Personalized support, for a faster resolution time and better customer satisfaction.
  • The possibility to handle multiple conversations simultaneously
    Messaging allows customer advisors to handle multiple conversations simultaneously, resulting in increased productivity. On average, professional agents are authorized to handle two chat conversations at one time with iAdvize, and up to six for some of our clients. A decisive advantage over the telephone channel in customer relations
  • Functionalities that facilitate advisors' workloads
    A conversational platform includes decisive performance tools for advisors. These tools can take the form of pre-recorded  templates of answers to the most frequently asked questions by visitors, or "smart answers", answers suggested by artificial intelligence. But it can be, quite simply, the possibility of sending links, co-browsing to accompany the visitor through their navigation, or mirroring to visualize their screen and better understand the problem. All these features facilitate the resolution of frictions in a very efficient way.

Here are the results achieved by 3 efficient consultants on sites while using our conversational platform in May 2020: 

finance and insurance sector

Performance obtained by an agent on the site of one of our clients in the finance and insurance sector, May 2020

blogpost illustration

Performance obtained by an agent on the site of one of our clients in the high-tech sector, May 2020

insurance

Performance obtained by an agent on the site of one of our clients in the insurance sector, May 2020

  • The possibility to partially automate conversations with a chatbot
    Messaging allows brands to deploy chatbots which can handle simple or recurring questions  autonomously and free-up your agents for questions with high added value. Customer service agents are thus able to increase their response capacity. Deploying and qualifying, the chatbot “sorts” the questions and transfers them to the appropriate responder. It is capable of collecting data from the customer, such as order or ID numbers, saving precious time for your teams.
  • Asynchronous functionality that optimizes agent occupation rates
    Evenings and certain periods of the day experience peaks in demand that online advisors cannot always meet. Asynchronous messaging addresses this problem by allowing conversations to be handled smoothly over time. Thanks to this feature, the visitor can ask their questions via chat, at any time. They will receive a personalized answer and be notified in their mailbox as soon as an advisor has dealt with it. For the agents, this solution makes it possible to create a backlog, which can be processed during calm periods. This results in the team occupancy rate increasing

2. Client Case Study: Teams in the Financial Sector Increase Their Productivity Through Messaging

Here is a particular case of a European company, specialized in consumer credit, which has deployed a very effective conversational strategy. Through messaging, this company managed to switch a large part of its customer service to digital, while reducing e-mail contacts by 20 to 30%.

This approach has enabled it to improve its productivity and reduce the company's contact costs by 30%. See the details in the infographics below:

Reduce calls and emails through messaging

*McKinsey & Company, Adapting customer experience in the time of coronavirus, avril 2020.
**Facebook, Keeping Our Services Stable and Reliable During the COVID-19 Outbreak, mars 2020.
***Hubspot Research, Consumer Customer support survey, 2018